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Mage #1.2
Mage, Vol. 2: The Hero Discovered, Book One Part 2
The second of two volumes reprinting the classic early issues of creator MATT WAGNER's epic fantasy trilogy. MAGE: THE HERO DISCOVERED VOL. 2 sees our reluctant everyman hero, Kevin Matchstick, discover the courage to accept his true power and defeat the dark forces that threaten reality itself. This edition features an all-new original cover by MATT WAGNER.
This seminal work has found an enduring popularity with readers for decades and marks creator MATT WAGNER's emergence as a powerful story-teller. With the release of the final part of the MAGE trilogy, the new editions of this series will spark interest with new readers and older fans alike.
This seminal work has found an enduring popularity with readers for decades and marks creator MATT WAGNER's emergence as a powerful story-teller. With the release of the final part of the MAGE trilogy, the new editions of this series will spark interest with new readers and older fans alike.
206 pages, Paperback
Published October 24, 2017
31 people want to read
About the author
Matt Wagner
967 books231 followersMatt Wagner is an American comic book writer and artist. In addition to his creator-owned series' Mage and Grendel, he has also worked on comics featuring The Demon and Batman as well as such titles as Sandman Mystery Theatre and Trinity, a DC Comics limited series featuring Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
October 21, 2019
Written in 1984, one of the earliest carnations of Urban Fantasy in comics. The book has been recolored, making Wagner's art look even better. Kevin Matchstick, Edsel and Sean Knight have been making inroads on tracking down the Grackleflints even with Mirth's absence. Disaster strikes even as they get close. All is finally revealed about who Kevin Matchstick really is and it has me excited. I love the mythos Wagner has created, drawing on elements of fairy while setting this in a modern city. Any fan of The Dresden Files will dig this book.
November 26, 2018
3.5 - 4 stars
Ok, this is more like it. The art takes a vast leap forward in this volume and the story tightens up quite a bit as well (perhaps because several of the main characters get killed off). Kevin and his team of 'white knights' have been making some in-roads in their battle against the Umbra Sprite and his minions of darkness. Despite this their gains seem to be rather small and they are ultimately not much closer to anything like a real victory.
In the midst of their plans disaster strikes and Kevin is forced to fall back on an old ally he thought gone and must finally face up to his identity and responsibilities. If he is able to embrace the reality of his position Kevin just might be able to overcome the vast forces that the Umbra Sprite has set against him in the hopes of destroying the Fisher King and bringing the victory of darkness that much closer.
All in all I liked this conclusion of Kevin Matchstick's inaugural arc as the superheroic incarnation of the Pendragon fighting once again against the forces of darkness. My main complaint might be that the story occasionally felt like it was on rails, with the conclusion already foregone and the final 'victory' of Kevin one that was not even brought about by his own hand. Still, I enjoyed what Wagner did here and think it's worth checking out if you're into urban fantasy...especially in its early incarnations in the funny books.
Remember: magic is green!
Ok, this is more like it. The art takes a vast leap forward in this volume and the story tightens up quite a bit as well (perhaps because several of the main characters get killed off). Kevin and his team of 'white knights' have been making some in-roads in their battle against the Umbra Sprite and his minions of darkness. Despite this their gains seem to be rather small and they are ultimately not much closer to anything like a real victory.
In the midst of their plans disaster strikes and Kevin is forced to fall back on an old ally he thought gone and must finally face up to his identity and responsibilities. If he is able to embrace the reality of his position Kevin just might be able to overcome the vast forces that the Umbra Sprite has set against him in the hopes of destroying the Fisher King and bringing the victory of darkness that much closer.
All in all I liked this conclusion of Kevin Matchstick's inaugural arc as the superheroic incarnation of the Pendragon fighting once again against the forces of darkness. My main complaint might be that the story occasionally felt like it was on rails, with the conclusion already foregone and the final 'victory' of Kevin one that was not even brought about by his own hand. Still, I enjoyed what Wagner did here and think it's worth checking out if you're into urban fantasy...especially in its early incarnations in the funny books.
Remember: magic is green!
April 21, 2022
Nice end to the 1st story arc. I was impressed with the writing on this series. Very good read. Very recommended
August 19, 2020
In my last Mage review, I said maybe I'd do a little thing about old comic cons versus new. And it's later, so here we are!
Cons use to come in two basic varieties. There were shitty cons. I don't mean they were a bad time, I just mean there was not a lot of what I'd call "glamour" to them. These were usually in a Holiday Inn basement (I didn't even know a Holiday Inn HAD a basement convention center, but I learned. Oh, did I learn). And the only focus was commerce, buying and selling comics. You MIGHT get the occasional bootlegger selling Star Wars Holiday Specials or the self-published dude who happened to live in that city. But for the most part, there were not celebrities, and there wasn't a lot besides comics.
These usually cost a small, token amount to get into, like $10 bucks or something. Sometimes I paid my cash and then didn't even spend $10 inside. But hey, you got exactly the goods you were sold: A roomful of comics.
Then there were big cons. This would be San Diego, NYC, and a few others, including Wizardworld Chicago, which I went to after graduating high school. I had a pretty good trip with a good buddy, and this one was a little different. It would still be totally unrecognizable to most people today, but there were a few celebrities there, like the dude who was the voice of Space Ghost, and there were some photo ops, and you could get your shit signed by the authors and illustrators, usually for free! You just had to have the guts to go up to them and ask. I wonder if the, erm, quality of these interactions has gone up, on the artist side, now that you have to buy special tickets and shit. Some people would charge for a picture and whatnot, and I do remember they brought out this super old dude who was an original Green Lantern artist, and of course he made absolute shit money for all his work, so you could get a drawing from the guy for a price that was too high for me, but I was tempted. I didn't even know the dude, but I felt bad for him. There were a couple other events, kaiju wrestling league, a live gameshow, shit like that. There was also some merch for sale, but the real key stuff was comics.
I didn't go to cons for several years, and then I went to Denver Comic Con. I won't say I hated it or anything remotely like that, and all the people there were nice. But they officially changed the name to Denver Pop Culture Con a few years back, and that's definitely more accurate.
Comic book culture has expanded in some ways, but...I'm not sure if its expansion has been a net positive.
I think it's awesome that people are into comics now because of the movies and shit. I'm not really worried about the Johnny-come-lately thing or the authenticity of fans. It's more, for me, that I like comics, and I'm less interested in movies.
I heard an interview with an adult, gay man, and he was speculating about gay culture being sort of absorbed by straight culture. When things like drag shows become normal, when people bring their kids to a drag queen storytime at a suburban library, does that help gay culture, or does that alter what it is? I don't have an opinion on that as it relates to gay culture, but I saw something like this in another culture, which is video game culture. Arcades, in the 80's, were seedy places. You didn't necessarily want your grade school kids hanging out there. And then, probably due to home consoles and gaming becoming a more widespread thing, the culture changed, and arcades were bright, clean places for families. And there are good and bad aspects to that.
My question applies to comic book culture: Does widening comics' place in pop culture improve and increase the audience and the comics, or is comic book cultured consumed by this much larger cultural juggernaut? Is widening so that you can buy comic book t-shirts at Target a good thing for people who love comics? And is it a good thing for comic books?
From my perspective...it's not without its problems. For people who really love comics, these new cons are not great. They're a lot more expensive, it's harder to get passes, and they're a lot more crowded. And that's not due to the comic content. It's because a television star is appearing. Or there's a panel with movie stars.
And this means there's not as many places for the people in the comics world who I consider stars, but who are not a big draw to cons. Writers and artists, people I would LOVE to meet, but who aren't the draw an Andrew Lincoln is.
My ultimate hope is that comic cons will go niche again. Now that there's a pop culture con, comics can say, "Fuck it, let's do our own thing again, just like we did before." And I think one might find great success with a "meat and potatoes" approach to cons where it's a comics-first approach. And I sincerely hope that people who've experienced pop culture cons will try it out and see if they like it. They might not. But I think some of them would.
Of course, the other big problem is that with the existence of eBay, it's harder to have a commerce-based con where the primary activities are buying and selling. But I think there are some ways to manage it.
For example, if you live-auction a premiere book, like an Amazing Fantasy 15, and if SOMEONE in that con is walking away with that, you might drum up some interest. If you're selling dollar books, you might get some collectors filling in series gaps where selling dollar books via mail is tough. If you set up an alley for regular folks to sell off their collections, I think that could provide some interest, and it would give some people who maybe aren't so hot on computers a chance to show off their stuff.
That's my admittedly selfish hope. I don't know if anyone else would want to go to that con, and I wouldn't try to convince anyone that it was better. Comics culture just used to be more its own thing. Now it's kind of a component of the Voltron that is geek culture. Maybe it's time to split apart for awhile.
Cons use to come in two basic varieties. There were shitty cons. I don't mean they were a bad time, I just mean there was not a lot of what I'd call "glamour" to them. These were usually in a Holiday Inn basement (I didn't even know a Holiday Inn HAD a basement convention center, but I learned. Oh, did I learn). And the only focus was commerce, buying and selling comics. You MIGHT get the occasional bootlegger selling Star Wars Holiday Specials or the self-published dude who happened to live in that city. But for the most part, there were not celebrities, and there wasn't a lot besides comics.
These usually cost a small, token amount to get into, like $10 bucks or something. Sometimes I paid my cash and then didn't even spend $10 inside. But hey, you got exactly the goods you were sold: A roomful of comics.
Then there were big cons. This would be San Diego, NYC, and a few others, including Wizardworld Chicago, which I went to after graduating high school. I had a pretty good trip with a good buddy, and this one was a little different. It would still be totally unrecognizable to most people today, but there were a few celebrities there, like the dude who was the voice of Space Ghost, and there were some photo ops, and you could get your shit signed by the authors and illustrators, usually for free! You just had to have the guts to go up to them and ask. I wonder if the, erm, quality of these interactions has gone up, on the artist side, now that you have to buy special tickets and shit. Some people would charge for a picture and whatnot, and I do remember they brought out this super old dude who was an original Green Lantern artist, and of course he made absolute shit money for all his work, so you could get a drawing from the guy for a price that was too high for me, but I was tempted. I didn't even know the dude, but I felt bad for him. There were a couple other events, kaiju wrestling league, a live gameshow, shit like that. There was also some merch for sale, but the real key stuff was comics.
I didn't go to cons for several years, and then I went to Denver Comic Con. I won't say I hated it or anything remotely like that, and all the people there were nice. But they officially changed the name to Denver Pop Culture Con a few years back, and that's definitely more accurate.
Comic book culture has expanded in some ways, but...I'm not sure if its expansion has been a net positive.
I think it's awesome that people are into comics now because of the movies and shit. I'm not really worried about the Johnny-come-lately thing or the authenticity of fans. It's more, for me, that I like comics, and I'm less interested in movies.
I heard an interview with an adult, gay man, and he was speculating about gay culture being sort of absorbed by straight culture. When things like drag shows become normal, when people bring their kids to a drag queen storytime at a suburban library, does that help gay culture, or does that alter what it is? I don't have an opinion on that as it relates to gay culture, but I saw something like this in another culture, which is video game culture. Arcades, in the 80's, were seedy places. You didn't necessarily want your grade school kids hanging out there. And then, probably due to home consoles and gaming becoming a more widespread thing, the culture changed, and arcades were bright, clean places for families. And there are good and bad aspects to that.
My question applies to comic book culture: Does widening comics' place in pop culture improve and increase the audience and the comics, or is comic book cultured consumed by this much larger cultural juggernaut? Is widening so that you can buy comic book t-shirts at Target a good thing for people who love comics? And is it a good thing for comic books?
From my perspective...it's not without its problems. For people who really love comics, these new cons are not great. They're a lot more expensive, it's harder to get passes, and they're a lot more crowded. And that's not due to the comic content. It's because a television star is appearing. Or there's a panel with movie stars.
And this means there's not as many places for the people in the comics world who I consider stars, but who are not a big draw to cons. Writers and artists, people I would LOVE to meet, but who aren't the draw an Andrew Lincoln is.
My ultimate hope is that comic cons will go niche again. Now that there's a pop culture con, comics can say, "Fuck it, let's do our own thing again, just like we did before." And I think one might find great success with a "meat and potatoes" approach to cons where it's a comics-first approach. And I sincerely hope that people who've experienced pop culture cons will try it out and see if they like it. They might not. But I think some of them would.
Of course, the other big problem is that with the existence of eBay, it's harder to have a commerce-based con where the primary activities are buying and selling. But I think there are some ways to manage it.
For example, if you live-auction a premiere book, like an Amazing Fantasy 15, and if SOMEONE in that con is walking away with that, you might drum up some interest. If you're selling dollar books, you might get some collectors filling in series gaps where selling dollar books via mail is tough. If you set up an alley for regular folks to sell off their collections, I think that could provide some interest, and it would give some people who maybe aren't so hot on computers a chance to show off their stuff.
That's my admittedly selfish hope. I don't know if anyone else would want to go to that con, and I wouldn't try to convince anyone that it was better. Comics culture just used to be more its own thing. Now it's kind of a component of the Voltron that is geek culture. Maybe it's time to split apart for awhile.
May 11, 2019
King Arthur with a baseball bat. Sounds more like a bad punk bad from the early 90s. #Icalldibs.
Wagner's story at first didn't grab me, but by the end of this book I've become far more fascinated with the world that he has created, the magical structure that he's given this world and the Everyman that the reader will follow the bitter end.
I loved this book.
Wagner's story at first didn't grab me, but by the end of this book I've become far more fascinated with the world that he has created, the magical structure that he's given this world and the Everyman that the reader will follow the bitter end.
I loved this book.
March 24, 2018
This book contains the second half of the first "book" of Matt Wagner's Mage trilogy. In it, Kevin Matchstick is forced to finally accept the truth of his place in the struggle against the evil Umbra Sprite, and of his place in the world. While still relatively early in his career, Wagner displays tremendous strengths and skills in terms of visual storytelling. His actual writing is very economical, but he conveys a great deal of information on each page. This has long been one of my favorite comics series, and it totally holds up to rereading today.
January 10, 2019
Kevin Matchstick realizes his destiny as the Pendragon and accepts his place and the role of his friends in the battle against the Umbra Sprite and the mystical dark forces at work. The story was an interesting mix of current setting and magical world and the artwork was classic Wagner, simple and iconic while conveying action and emotion. Collecting Issues #9-15.
December 5, 2018
Another leap forward in art and storytelling. Not quite enough for me to bump it up to 4 stars but so close. The finale somehow manages to be epic and anticlimactic at the same time. After the Interlude at the end, I’m really looking forward to re-reading Book 2.
March 27, 2020
The secondary characters (Mirth, Edsel, and Sean) are truly awesome. The ending (including the sudden appearance and immediate disappearance of the Fisher King) feels a little anticlimactic (fortunately the whole story continues in the rest of the trilogy).
April 28, 2020
For such a pillar of independent comic storytelling, this did not age well. Well intentioned, but its execution feels a little clumsy.
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September 18, 2019Mage: The Hero Discovered was one of Matt Wagner’s first comics, and it had a pretty big impact on the industry when it was published in 1984. For one, it was an independent book, and expanded what creators could do outside DC and Marvel. Secondly, Wagner’s writing was more nuanced and modern than most of what was being published at the time. Comics were becoming readable by the mid-80’s*, and Mage stood out from the pack by eschewing common superhero writing characteristics (i.e. unnecessary exposition, exclamation points after every sentence). It’s been overshadowed by its contemporaries, like Swamp Thing and Watchmen, but Mage holds up fairly well today.
Oh, and the story’s pretty good: everyman Kevin Matchstick happens upon a magician named Mirth in an alley, and Mirth grants him seemingly indestructible powers. What follows is urban fantasy steeped in myth, with a classic hero’s quest at the center. Wagner does a good job with the characters and moves the story along at a solid pace with several surprises. Admittedly, the story’s predictable, and if you know the major reveal, it’s even less impressive. I did, and wasn’t as taken with it as I might’ve been. I still had fun, though, and can appreciate Wagner’s storytelling for what it is.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention his art. I love Wagner’s style, and it just gets better as the book goes along. One particular thing I like about his art in Mage is how he incorporates sound effects into the panels. They’re used very creatively and give the story an extra oomph of character and fun.
So, I recommend Mage as a historically significant comic, and as a fun hero story. Don’t expect anything Earth-shattering, but come with tempered expectations and you might be surprised.
*I kid, of course, but only a little.
Oh, and the story’s pretty good: everyman Kevin Matchstick happens upon a magician named Mirth in an alley, and Mirth grants him seemingly indestructible powers. What follows is urban fantasy steeped in myth, with a classic hero’s quest at the center. Wagner does a good job with the characters and moves the story along at a solid pace with several surprises. Admittedly, the story’s predictable, and if you know the major reveal, it’s even less impressive. I did, and wasn’t as taken with it as I might’ve been. I still had fun, though, and can appreciate Wagner’s storytelling for what it is.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention his art. I love Wagner’s style, and it just gets better as the book goes along. One particular thing I like about his art in Mage is how he incorporates sound effects into the panels. They’re used very creatively and give the story an extra oomph of character and fun.
So, I recommend Mage as a historically significant comic, and as a fun hero story. Don’t expect anything Earth-shattering, but come with tempered expectations and you might be surprised.
*I kid, of course, but only a little.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews